Sunday, March 29, 2009

Risk of Heart Attack is more on Women in Living with Parents Marriage


It's for women, not men. After reading this reports, many wives will go to their husband with ultimatum, to leave the parents or ...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women, but not men, who live in households with a spouse, children, and parents have double the risk for a coronary event, such as a heart attack or need for heart surgery, as women who live only with a spouse, according to research from Japan.
Stress may play a role in this increased risk, as about a quarter of the women living in a three-generation household or living with a spouse and parent reported high stress. Fewer women were highly stressed when they lived alone, with a spouse, or with a spouse and child, Professor H. Iso and colleagues report in the journal Heart.

However, among the women, those living in three-generation households had twice the risk for heart-related events as women living only with a spouse. Moreover, women living with spouses and parents had triple the risk for heart problems compared with women living only with a spouse.

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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Trigger for Migraine

March 11 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists believe they may have found the biological trigger to a particular type of migraine headache.
In the March 12 issue of Neuron, an Italian university study on mice found that increased levels of the neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain appear to kick off a cortical spreading depression (CSD), a phenomenon that causes migraine sufferers to experience a visual disturbance known as migraine aura. The mice in the study had a gene mutation that has been shown to make people more susceptible to familial hemiplegic migraine (FHM), a subtype of severe migraine accompanied by the aura.
Brain imaging has previously shown that strong neuronal depolarization creeps across the cerebral cortex during CSD, initially increasing electrical signals in the brain, then suppressing neural activity for an extended period of time. Researchers have suspected CSD may flip on certain switches that start a migraine headache.
The researchers from the University of Padova, led by senior author Daniela Pietrobon, found that calcium influx and subsequent glutamate release at cortical pyramidal cell synapses were greater in mice with the FHM mutation. When the release of glutamate -- the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain -- was decreased to normal levels, the mice did not experience aura-inducing CSD.

Friday, March 20, 2009

Study: A Heart Disease Risk Person is also a Cancer High Risk


Now, avoid heart disease, you may get free from cancer risk as well.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A protein that signals inflammation and heart disease may also show that a person has a high risk of cancer, researchers said on Friday.
People with high levels of C-reactive protein or CRP, already being studied for its links to heart disease, had a 30 percent higher risk of cancer, Danish researchers found. And cancer patients with the highest CRP levels were 80 percent more likely to die early, they found.
Five years after cancer diagnosis, 40 percent of patients with high CRP levels were alive, compared with 70 percent of patients with low CRP levels.
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Green Leaf Vegetables Reduces Cancer Risk


Beside the fact in this study that it is significant to men than women(?), we must take that consistently vegetables may lower colorectal cancer.

Our study, consistent with findings from the Cancer Prevention Study II Nutrition Cohort Study (observed that vegetable intake was related to lower risk of colorectal cancer for men but not for women. This gender difference may be partially explained by differential reporting errors. Studies have found that healthful attitudes, beliefs, and dietary habits were more strongly correlated with vegetable intake among women than among men and that women overreported foods perceived as healthy. Misreporting of fruit and vegetable intakes by women in our study would have led to exposure misclassification, resulting in an attenuated association.

In this large, prospective cohort study with 2,972 incident colorectal cancer cases and extensive information on diet and other colorectal cancer risk factors, the researcher observed that vegetable intake was associated with a lower risk of colorectal cancer for men but not for women. The association was stronger among individuals with very low intakes of fruits and vegetables, suggesting a certain minimum amount of daily fruit and vegetable consumption to avoid increased risk of colorectal cancer. Among subgroups of vegetables, green leafy vegetable intake was inversely associated with risk of colorectal cancer for men.

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Obesity: Again, blame it to the genes


CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. researchers have found a gene responsible for turning a plate of pasta into fat, offering new clues about how the body metabolizes carbohydrates and how they contribute to obesity.
The gene, called DNA-PK, appears to regulate the process in the liver that turns carbohydrates into fat, the University of California, Berkeley team reported on Thursday in the journal Cell.
"We hope that this research will one day help people eat bread, pasta and rice and not worry about getting fat," Roger Wong, a graduate student who worked on the study, said in a statement.
When they bred mice with a disabled version of this gene, the mice stayed slim even when fed the equivalent of an all-you-can-eat pasta buffet.
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Purified Water is Bad for Our Health?





Well, actually I don't know if it is real. But the person who says it is an MD and logically acceptable. Do I have to take care of what I drink as well (as a matter of fact, my fresh water drink), while a lot of notice on food security already? Fresh water should be good for our health.

Reverse osmosis or purified water is free of dissolved minerals and, because of this, has the special property of being able to actively absorb toxic substances from the body and eliminate them. Studies validate the benefits of drinking purified water when one is seeking to cleanse or detoxify the system for short periods of time (a few weeks at a time).

The more purified water a person drinks, the higher the body acidity becomes. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, "Purified" water, being essentially mineral-free, is very aggressive, in that it tends to dissolve substances with which it is in contact.

There is a correlation between the consumption of soft water (purified water is extremely soft) and the incidence of cardiovascular disease. Cells, tissues and organs do not like to be dipped in acid and will do anything to buffer this acidity including the removal of minerals from the skeleton and the manufacture of bicarbonate in the blood.






Genes determine cancer risk of smokers?


NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Certain changes in a gene called ADAM33 can determine whether a smoker is likely to develop chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) or not, new research indicates.
Only about a quarter of long-term smokers develop COPD, the authors note. ADAM33 has been shown in previous studies to be associated with asthma and overreactive airways. This relationship, however, has not been studied in tobacco smokers who are susceptible to COPD.
In the new study, the research team looked for small genetic changes or "polymorphisms" in ADAM33 in 880 long-term heavy smokers.
Two hundred eighty-seven of the study subjects had COPD and 311 did not. All of them were older than age 50 years and all had been smoking at least a pack of cigarettes each day for 20 years. Ninety-seven percent of the subjects were male.
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Green Tea for gum health


NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A cup of green tea per day may help keep gum disease at bay, a new study suggests.Researchers found that among middle-aged Japanese, the odds of having gum disease declined as the men's intake of green tea rose.
For each daily cup they drank, the risk of having signs of gum disease -- including receding, easily bleeding gums -- inched downward, the researchers report in the Journal of Periodontology.
The findings do not mean, however, that green tea is a substitute for seeing the dentist. The relationship between green tea and lower odds of gum disease was fairly weak, Dr. Yoshihiro Shimazaki, one of the researchers on the study, told Reuters Health.
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Thursday, March 19, 2009

Champagne Has Benefits for your Brain Cells Health


According to research published in the April 18 issue of Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, Champagne may help protect the brain against injuries incurred during a stroke and other ailments, such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
According to the report, which is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Reading in England and the Università degli studi di Cagliari, located in Monserrato, Italy, drinking Champagne responsibly may benefit one's health because previous research has shown the sparkling wine contains high amounts of polyphenols.
"There has been much recent interest in the potential of plant-derived polyphenols to protect against neuronal injury," wrote the study's authors. In previous research, they said, regular, moderate consumption of red wine has also been shown to help slow down premature aging and improve circulation.
Polyphenols are known antioxidants, which are believed to help prevent cell death due to oxidative stress. Though polyphenols are found in greater abundance in red wines, mainly due to longer exposure to the grape seeds and skins during the winemaking process, past studies have found Champagne to contain high amounts of other types of phenolic compounds, such as tyrosol and caffeic acid.
In order to test if the polyphenols found in Champagne are similarly beneficial to those in red wines, the scientists prepared extracts from blanc de blancs Champagnes (made with Chardonnay only) and blanc de noir Champagnes (made exclusively from Pinot Noir and/or Pinot Meunier). After confirming that the extracts contained measurable levels of the aforementioned polyphenols, the scientist prepared several samples of cortical neuron cells from mice.
Some of the cells were left alone to serve as a control group, while the others were pretreated with the Champagne extracts. Once the nerve cells were observed to be firing, the scientists simulated a stroke by exposing the cells to a compound called peroxynitrite, a reactive compound formed in the brain during inflammatory conditions.
The scientists monitored the way the brain cells reacted to the presence of the peroxynitrite, and found that "pretreatment with Champagne wine extracts resulted in significant protection against neurotoxicity." The blanc de noir extract offered the greater protection because of the red-wine component, the authors wrote, though they pointed out that the amounts of polyphenols in Champagne vary greatly from "variety, vintage and a wide range of environmental factors."
The scientists believe the Champagne extracts protected neuron cells in several ways, noting that in the sample with the highest concentration of sparkling wine, brain-cell function was completely restored over time. The researchers added that caffeic acid and tyrosol may help to regulate the cells' response to injury with their anti-inflammatory properties. The compounds also act as cellular-level mops, essentially cleaning up and removing harmful chemicals from the body.
The scientists also wrote that there is evidence that dietary polyphenols can cross the "blood-brain barrier," which would suggest that the above molecular behavior has the potential to act in the same way, within the human central nervous system, if consumed.
"At this stage it is too early to say whether drinking Champagne may have a beneficial effect on brain aging," said Spencer, as it remains to be seen if the wine would have a similar effect on human brain cells as it did on those of mice. "However, we are about to begin a new human investigation where we will attempt to address this. Hopefully we will be able to shed more light on the potential beneficial effects of Champagne on human health in the future," he said.
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Sunday, March 15, 2009

Green Tea Drinkers have lower cancer risk


NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women who get plenty of mushrooms and green tea in their diets may have a lower risk of developing breast cancer, new study findings suggest
The study, of more than 2,000 Chinese women, found that the more fresh and dried mushrooms the women ate, the lower was their breast cancer risk.
The risk was lower still among those who also drank green tea everyday.
It's known that the rate of breast cancer in China is four- to five- times lower than rates typically seen in developed countries -- though the rate has been climbing over the past few decades in the most affluent parts of China.
Drink Green Tea is worthed.
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